And for a brief moment I thought I had discovered Elfriede Jelinek‘s blog. Why, after all, should she not have one, forefront thinker, Nobel Prize winner after all? Amazing enough: She’s going to turn 61 this year. Can’t be, she’s pegged in my mind as a perpetual 40 (image to the left shows her in 2000, age 53, and still she looks like 40).

The thing about Elfriede: I am glad I do not (have to) write the way or the stuff she does. Although I LOVE the way she writes (but would be unable to defend it). I can see and measure the depths from which she is reporting, but I wouldn’t want to go down there myself. I think I’d lose my mind. It is a selfish approach, but whenever I read a piece by her, I disregard the literary message and try to relate to the person behind the text. That is what interests me most, her texts are barriers, and I have never been particularly impressed by those barrier-type texts (think: Ingeborg Bachmann, that other Austrian writer, which, if you would forgive me, I was never able to make sense of), but I always imagined to have a vague sense of the person BEHIND those texts. I would so much like to meet her one day, but of course that is not very likely. And meet her the way I’d like to meet her is completely ruled out: a friendly conversation about nothing in which we would have to have some OTHER thing to look at, to distract us and deflect our conversation from the actual encounter. This year’s opera ball would have been a splendid opportunity, we could have made fun of Paris Hilton and have used these jokes as a foot path to deeper conversations… just a dream of course.

And now I found her ‘blog’, but only to discover that it is none. Her so-called blog is hosted on a really sweet compuserve address, http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/elfriede/. In spite of the name of the address, it does not reveal a single word of her, it all stays carefully fictional. Worst of all, it specifies theater@rowohlt.de as contact address – rowohlt being one of the key German publishing houses. Dream on, my soul – there are thousands of women (probably not too many men) writers out there who would love to establish personal contact with Elfriede – and it’s just not gonna happen that easy. And of course she (or her publisher) are going to protect any of her words in as much as possible.

But deep inside myself, I hope that she has an anonymous blog where she doesn’t present herself as a Nobel prize winning author, but where she simply writes about the boring things that happen in any blogger’s life (and how cool would it be if found that blog:-)